Nothing new in the poem department this week, just me and my library poet pals.

The photos are special to me though, old photos, used in bits and pieces here before, of one of my favorite places on the planet.

The photos were taken around, but mostly in, the Big Bend National Park, and, of those in the park, mostly in the Chisos Basin high in the Chisos Mountains.

Founded in 1944, Big Bend National Park is mostly a backcountry park. It contains more than 150 miles of desert and mountain hiking trails, with overnight accommodations ranging from primitive camping to RV parks to the lodge and cabins in the basin. Being someone who sees making my own bed as pushing the envelope in "roughing it," I have no experience with the primitive camping, though my son does and the park is one of his preferred places for doing it.The Rio Grande River (118 miles of it) marks the boundary between the park and Mexico. (The Rio Grande can be seen at the bottom of a canyon in one of the pictures below.)

Covering approximately 700,000 acres, the park is located in one of the most remote and uninhabited areas of the United States.

The pictures in this post were taken by me over course of a number of visits, in different years and seasons and with different cameras. We haven't been in a couple of years and I miss it. No phone, no TV, no internet and, I have to admit, as much as I love it, three days and two nights is about the most I can take before lusting for my normal diet of electronics.

Chisos Basin,lush haven high in the Chisos Mountains,the mountains lapped bythe Chihuahua Desert to the south and eastwhere, after a damp winter,colors carpet the gravel desert floor

and in the mountains, high trees,bear, cougar, families of javelinas who walkthe same trails up and around the mountain all of their lives and birdsof every persuasion

and in the basin,peace in the mountain shadowof the rising sun; peacein the evening as the sun setsthrough the westward facing notchbetween mountain peaks, a high, clear eyeto the purple desert below

I begin this week with several poems from my friend and frequent "Here and Now" contributor, Joanna M. Weston.

Joanna grew up in North Downs of Kent, under one of the main bombing runs to London. She left England at age 18 for Canada where she has lived every since, becoming a Canadian citizen on February 15, 1965, the same day the maple leaf flag was adopted. She is a full-time writer of poetry, short stories, children's books and poetry reviews. She has published internationally in journals and anthologies and has two middle-readers in print, The Willow-Tree Girl and Those Blue Shoes.

Her latest book, from where I borrow these poems, is A Summer Father, published in 2006 by Frontenac House.

Joanna dedicates her book to father, Major John William Fletcher Jarmain, who died on June 26, 1944 in Normandy, France.

Trees

did he rememberthe apple treesand the willowat the end of our garden?

did he rememberhow his childrenran to touch and touchsilver-grey bark?

he is recordedin one photowith his sonframed by leavesand fruit

Loss

Mother lostthe green glass broochFather gave me

dropped itbetween apple tree and lavendersomewhere on the pathto becoming an emerald

I clipped grass with scissorsturned soft earthfound a knife patterned with fishand a spoon engraved with leaves

she sketched patterns of barkdetails of miniature: an ant on a grass stem a speed of red spiderswhile I weptthe emptiness of green

Studio Portrait, 1942

two childrencaught in a black and whitephotograph

my brother in shortsand Fair Isle sweaterand me in smocked dress

frozen eyesand tight mouths

dare not smile

we might breakspill onto the carpet

turn it red

Soft Answers

between all the morningsand "good nights"lie questionsa child would askand a father answer

Like Other People's FathersHad he been hiding in all my childhood moods....?

would he openthe curtainsfor his daughterand let starlight in?

break the blackout?

catch bombsbefore the fell?

The last, harder than usual, winter killed just about everything in my back yard, and the last lack of rain since makes it equally hard to get anything new started. So, I've been spending a lot of time out there, trying to develop something growing that will bring in some color than brown. I sat about 20 minutes last week, watching the struggle against futility as it occurred.

paying for the pick-up

the squirrelis determined and persistent

as he triesagain and again

to jump onto the birdbath -because, I suppose, he thinks there’s something there

as right on the other side of the fence wherethe creek flows clear and cool

~~

but who am I to judge a creature’sintentions, could be

it is not the water he seeks, but theceramic figure in the center, little Eeyore

dancing,splashing in the water,

a friend-seeking adventure, maybe, a new kind of friend the squirrel seeks,

like in Christopher Robin’s woodswhere all creatures furred and feathered

play together in the lightof a child’s innocence…

~~~

but, I speculate -

the main fact is whatever the squirrel wantson top of the birdbath, he is bound,

he is sure,to get it, jumping over and over again,

some times from directly under the rim, sometimeswith a running start, and always with the same

result - he can reach the top,head and shoulders over the rim,

but, sharp-fingered little paws scratching at the concrete, he finds no hold, slipping, like a man slipping

from a precarious perch into deep, unforgivingwaters, panicked eyes and flailing tail

as he falls backward,rolls, stands again, upright, paws

folded across his gray stomach,as he considers the challenge anew,

gathers the muscles in his powerful legs, preparing for another jump…

~~~

is there a moral to this, I don’t know,but there was always a moral in the 100-acre-wood

so maybe here as well, maybe something like the old saw,

“a man’s reach often exceeds his grasp”or “if at first you don’t succeed….etcetera, blah, blah”

or, in a more south Texas lingo -any fool cowboy can jump on a bull,

it’s the riding himthat pays for the pick-up

Next I have a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the few survivors of the beats. The poem is from his book Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, a collection of poems of the 1970's published in 1988 by New Directions.

Ferlinghetti says many things in this poem, some clearly foolish, hard to read this far from the Nixon era he wrote in. But what I read to be the heart of the poem it rings all the bells for me, a call, relevant even today, to rescue poetry from academia, a call for poets who have done something in their life beyond just studying poetry, writing poetry and teaching other people how to spend their lives studying and writing poetry.

People like me, in plainer words, who, whatever the quality of our product, write from a full life in a world that cares little for poetry and less for poets, writing for those people in that world. That's a connection, if it can be done, worth the making.

A little long, this poem, but what a great reassurance for my shy and retiring poet friends.

Populist Manifesto

Poets, come out of our closets,Open your windows, open your doors,You have been holed-up to longin your closed worlds.Come down, come downfrom your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,your Mount Analogues and Montparnassesdown from your foothills and mountains,our of your tepees and domes.The trees are still fallingand we'll to the woods no more.No time now for sitting in themAs a man burns down his own houseto roast his pig.No more changing Hare Krishnawhile Rome burns.San Francisco's burning,Mayakovsky's Moscow's burningthe fossil -fuels of life.Night & the Horse approacheseating light, heat & power,and the clouds have trousers.No time now for the artist to hideabove, beyond, behind the scenes,indifferent, paring his fingernails,refining himself out of existence.No time now for our little literary games,no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,no time now for fear & loathing,time now only for light & love.We have seen the best minds of our generationdestroyed by boredom at poetry readings.Poetry isn't a secret society,It isn't a temple either.Secret words & chants won't do any longer.The hour of oming is over,the time for keening come,time for keening & rejoicingover the coming endof industrial civilizationwhich is bad for earth & Man.Time not to face outwardin the full lotus positionwith eyes wide open,Time not to open your mouthswith a new open speech,time now to communicate with all sentient beings,All you "Poets of the Cities"hung in museums, including myself,All you poet's poets writing poetryabout poetry,All you poetry workshop poetsin the boondock heart of America,All you house-broken Ezra Pounds,All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poetsAll you pre-stressed Concrete poets,All you cunnilingual poets,All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti,All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,All you masters of the sawmill haikuin the Siberias of America,All you eyeless unrealists,All you self-occulting supersurrealists,All you bedroom visionariesand closet agitpropagators,All you Groucho Marxist poetsand leisure-class Comradeswho lie around all dayand talk about the workingclass proletariat,All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,All you Boston Brahmins and Bolinas bucolics,All you den mothers of poetry,All you zen brothers of poetry,All you poetry reviewersdrinking the blood of poets,All you Poetry Police -Where are Whitman's wild children,where the great voices speaking outwith a sense of sweetness and sublimity,where the great new vision,the great world-view,the high prophetic songof the immense earthand all that sings itand our relation to it -Poets, descendto the street of the world once moreand open your minds & eyeswith the old visual delight,Clear your throat and speak up,Poetry is dead, long live poetrywith terrible eyes and buffalo strength.Don't wait for the Revolutionor it'll happen without you,Stop mumbling and speak outwith a new wide-open poetrywith a new commonsensual "public surface"with other subjective levelsor other subversive levels,a tuning fork in the inner earto strike below the surface.Of you own sweet Self still singyet utter "the word enmasse" -Poetry the common carrierfor the transplantation of the publicto higher placesthan other wheels can carry it.Poetry still falls from the skiesinto our streets still open.They haven't put up the barricades, yet,the streets are still alive with faces,lovely men & women still walking there,still lovely creatures everywhere, in the eyes of all the secret of allstill buried there,Whitman's wild children still sleeping there,Awake and walk in the open air.

This is something I wrote in January, 2008.

It's true, I almost never remember my dreams, but when I do, it's almost always about some very specific places I'm sure I've never been.

This is one of those places.

dreams

i say i never remember my dreams and mostly I don't, even though I know some of the ones i remember best are dreams about a house, complete in every detail, where no house has ever been, a house of many rooms, a maze of rooms that take me, always, to where i began, with wood, lots of wood, floors of polished hardwood that gleams in a kind of yellow light, one wooden chair in a corner, high-backed and arms, old fashioned lamps in an old fashioned house with high ceilings and polished wooden beams and everything is brown, a house, i have been inside, walked on its polished floors through every room that all lead back back to the first room, a room always one door away from every other room, i know this place even though i know it does not exist

Next I have a poet, Peggy Zuleika Lynch from the Feeding the Crow, a collection of eight Austin, Texas, poets published in 1988 by Plain View Press.

Frequently published in journals and anthologies, as well as author a number of books, Lynch is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Grandfather sitsher on his kneeshe being only threemerely acceptsthis kindly stepof where to sitwhile he chatterson various matters: kitty cats, bears, dogs with long hairshe being feistytwists and squirmsturnsas kids usually dotrying all the whileto slide throughto the floorand play some

Aunt Oma's way for earning her pay

pedal pushingneedle flying up and downin and outbent overconcentratingmaking miracles of designfor the wealthy ladieswith fabric, lace and tapemoment after momentday after dayyear after year

Della

her life was a teapotconstantly pouring outan essence of warmthuntil her whole beingemptied, leavingflecks of unread tea leavespatterning her end

This is a follow-up to the basketball poem I posted last week, this poem written before the final story is told.

the dead rise, and prevail

a miracle shotwith only half a secondleft on the clockand the battle is won

but not the war -

the war will not bewon in seconds, but through96 long minutes on ahardwood court -

two more battles,and neither can be lostand the odds are not good for our heroes

but last night,hope was reborn

last night was an ascension,like Christrolling back the rock,his wounds still fresh from the cross,

it was a night for the deadto ariseand prevail

and I could not sleepafterso rapiddid beat my heart

I've lived most of my life straddling a cultural and linguistic and geographic line between the American South and the American Southwest. I find, in the way I think, some congruence with the cultures of the south, particularly when it comes to the foods, but it is the ethos of the Southwest where I feel the greatest kinship. It is in the poetry of many Native Americans that seems to best incorporate that ethos and no Native American poet more than Simon J. Ortiz.

I have four of his short poems from his book, Woven Stone, a very large collection of his work published in 1992 by the University of Arizona Press.

Born Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1941, Ortiz is a Native American writer of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. He is one of the most respected and widely read Native American poets.

So many of his poems seem to start in or near a bus or a bus station, it almost convinces me to take a long bus ride. But I don't think it would work for me like it works for him. He's a talker and a listener; I'm a watcher and only ever see half the story.

A Barroom Fragment

He was talking,"I invited her to Las Vegas,and when we got to the hotelshe asked for a separate room."I told her, "Shit, if you want a room to yourself, why babythat's alright, have it"I had brought her up thereon a four-million dollar airplane,and I told her, "You cango across the streetand take a thirty-thousand-dollar busback to Burbank."That was Coyote talking.

Four Years Ago

Four years agoI was in Wisconsinsomewhere,making for the stateline,crossing,heading homewards.I wonderedin what period of historyI was then.

Going home.It's got red and brown land,sage and when it rainsit smells like pinonand pretty girls at a Squaw Dance.

I know.

Washyuma Motor Hotel

Beneath the cement foundationsof the motel, the ancient spiritsof the people conspire sacred tricks.They tell stories and jokes and laughand laugh.

The American passersbyget out of their hot, stuffy carsat evening, pay their money wordlesslyand fall asleep without benefit of dreams.

The next morning they get up,dress automatically, brush their teeth,get in their cars and drive away.They haven't noticed that the cementfoundations of the motor hotelare crumbling, bit by bit.

The ancient spirits tell storiesand jokes and laugh and laugh.

Passing Through Little Rock

The old Indian ghosts -

"Auapaw""Waccamaw" - are just bill board wordsin this crummy town.

"You know I'm worrying a lot lately,"he says in the old hotel bar.

"You're getting golder and scared ain't you?"

I just want to cross the next hillgo through that clump of treesand come out the other side

and see a clean river,the whole earth newand hear the noise it makesat birth.

This piece is from early 2007, brought to mind by the weather today, which is strangely weird, being the first of May, cooler even than the early January day this poem was written.

fire brigade

fire brigade

fifty degrees today and a little damp, perfect for sitting around a fire outside and contemplating the larger questions of life and the universe

so i got me some of the wood i keep for such contemplating sessions, just enough to fill the chiminea, and carefully built my fire base

a big problem right off

i only have about a half a squirt of lighter fluid and i knew that wasn't enough so i set out to apply my boy scout experience only then remembering i wasn't ever a boy scout causing a quick transition to plan “b” which involved picking my backyard clean of small twigs and branches and that pile of natural fuel combined with the entire sunday edition of the newspaper of the 7th largest city in the united states (smaller than phoenix by just two thousand parched and dehydrated souls) and i had a fire not a roaring fire by any means but a fire at last

a smoky fire

a very smoky fire in fact such that my entire backyard was smothered in clouds of gray and black smoke leading me to worry that one of my neighbors might panic at all the smoke and call the fire department but that turned out not to be a problem when it started to rain putting out the fire and eliminating its smoky output

my hot chocolate had gone cold while I had been attending to the fire so i took it inside and popped it into the micro wave until it was steamy hot again then sat down at the kitchen table and watched it rain all the while contemplating the larger questions of life and the universe

I have several poems by Frederick Seidel, from his collection, Poems, 1959-1979, Knopf in 1989.

Born in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, Seidel is author of many books and recipient of numerous literary prizes and honors.

Take me down from the shelf.Oh never to be yourselfAnd always to be the same.

Like the air and the wind,The wind and the air.I hear a very quiet voice,

Emphatic like a flower,SayingIt is I.

Before the next poem, a memory from me.

Everyone over the age of 4 on that day remembers it, either as a child's dream or in the sharp, slicing light of black and white TV. Twenty years old on that day, near to twenty-one, for me, like for many, it was the day innocence died and today was born. I wasn't a believer in the Camelot myth, and later learned much to justify that disbelief, but it made no difference then and makes no difference now.

November 24, 1963

The trees breathe in like show dogs, stiffeningUnder the silver leases of light rainTo spines. A Cyclone fence that guards the moireEmbankment of the shrunken reservoirBristles with rain barbs, each a milk tooth, stingOf stings, where fall began. The park's a stain,The black paths shimmer under cellophane.

The rain points prick th lake and touch the drought,The dusk blue of a sterile needletip.The brightness and the light has been struck down.

I was on a roll early in 2008, writing some pretty good short poems.

on the death of Audrey Hepburn

lord she was beautiful

but we were adolescent boys in a time of mammillary obsession and never noticed

clarification

young girl maybe twenty not much more fiery in speech and manner says

there ain’t no country called Hispanica so how can I be Hispanic

and there ain’t never been no country called Latin and if they was they been dead a couple of thousand years anyway

so no way I’m Latin

but there is a Mexico and that’s where my blood roots lie so that makes me Mexican -

you got a problem with that?

omen

been here before

vision blurry equals sugar high

i look to the future and hope to see

the master

i just let the cat out to do her morning duty

it’s 35 degrees and raining

she was back at the door again wanting in before I could leave the room

she is a master in the winter flash poop-n-cover competition

the shortest poem

the shortest poem is

the sigh in a lover's farewell

when the gate finally opens

the hardest part is the sitting still and waiting - watching for the moment the image the word the stray thought that opens the gate to the poem, lurking like a riled bull waiting to be rode, to dance to your command...

if you’re poet enough

while walking in the neighborhood, late

the few leaves still clinging to the trees rustle in the breeze like water over rocks

the cold north wind bracing - like drinking from a mountain stream

Next, I have two poets from the anthology The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, subtitled "From Ancient to Contemporary, the Full 3,000 year Tradition." published in 2005 by Anchor Books.

This week I have chosen to stick to a couple of contemporary, or near contemporary, poets from the book.

The first poet is Lin Huiyin who was born in 1904 and died in 1955. She was the daughter of a powerful governor and traveled with him to Europe and the United States. She and her husband studied together at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was forced to study art instead of architecture because the School of Architecture was not open to women. Nevertheless, she became an important designer and architect in China and both she and her husband taught architecture at Qinghua University, where her husband founded the architecture program. The both also worked together as architectural historians, attempting to preserve China's heritage. She was involved with the Crescent Moon Society and wrote fiction, drama, and essays in addition to poetry.

In the Communist era she and her husband helped to design the national flag, the national emblem and the Monument ot the People's Hero in Tianamen Square.

This poem was translated by Michelle Yeh.

Sitting in Quietude

Winter has a message of its ownWhen the cold is like a flower -Flowers have their fragrance, winter has its handful of memories.The shadow of a withered branch, like lean blue smoke,Paints a stroke across th4e afternoon window.In the cold the sunlight grows pale and slanted.It is just like this.I sip the tea quietlyAs if waiting for a guest to speak.

Next, I have a poem by Dai Wangshu. Born in the Zhejiang province in 1905, he and a friend founded the Blue Society and published a literary magazine called Friends of the Blue Society. Studying the Chinese language and Literature at Shanghai University and then French at Zhendan University beginning in 1923, he and friends began publishing another literary journal, Jade Stone in 1926. He had joined the Communist Youth Corps in 1925, then the Left-Wing Writers League in 1930 and was arrested for revolutionary activities. He published his second book in 1933 and returned to China in 1935 as editor in chief of Modern Literature. After the Sino-Japanese war, he returned to Hong Kong and continued to work as an editor. After the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in 1941, he was sent to prison briefly and it was while in prison that he wrote the poem below. He died in 1950.

The poem was translated by Gregory B. Lee.

Written on a Prison Wall

If I die here,Friends, do not be sad,I shall always exist in your hearts.

One of you died,In a cell in Japanese-occupied territory,He harbored deep hatred,You should always remember.

When you come back,Dig up his mutilated body from the mud,Hoist his soul up highWith your victory cheers.

And then place his bones on a mountain peak,To bask in the sun, and bathe in the wind:In that dark damp dirt cell,This was his sole beautiful dream.

I had a rant here on the necessity for us to get past our 9-11 obsessions, irrelevant today as this is the day we killed bin Laden (Justice, at last!).

I decide to delete that poem and use the following instead, another rant about another kind of justice and another kind of atrocity.

Some years ago, in another city, I was appointed by the county judge to fill an unexpired term on the County Welfare Board. After a year or so, the term was up and I was asked to accept reappointment.

The plight of so many children suffering from vicious abuse by their parents, sometime unto death, made the task of serving on that board the most heartbreaking and impossible task I had ever undertaken. I had taken many such community service appointments in the past and had never faced anything as hopeless as this one.

Basically, I cut and ran, declining reappointment. I was not accustomed to futility and had, in that position, taken on more than I could accept.

That story is background to this poem, another rant, written a couple of years ago after a particularly bloody two weeks for children in San Antonio.

where does justice draw the line?

i want to write about the four children murdered by their parents in this city in the last two weeks, to memorialize them somehow, but cannot

i don’t have the language to say what i want to say and my mind drifts to other things to evil, for example

i don’t believe in god but i do believe in evil, the diabolic evil of mass murders and the casual evil of parents who kill their children - the mother who smothered her baby because it would not stop crying, the father, angered to madness by his wife, who shoots their two daughters, age 10 and 5, in the head, then kills himself, the woman who swings her baby like a baseball bat to strike her lover - what do we do with these people?

i’m a believer in capital punishment, i believe humanity has the right and obligation to protect itself against the most evil among us, some born that way, i am convinced, evil from the moment they leave their mothers’ womb, others who learn their evil from the circumstances of their life, born or made, i don’t care, it is the consequence of their act not the consequences of their lives that matter, as a consequence of their act they do not deserve our solicitude, maintaining the life of Charles Manson for a year costs as much as or more than sending a needy student through a year of college - I say kill the bloody son of a bitch and send the money to the kid

but that’s an easy case

it’s the drawing of the line that makes these questions hard

three parents killed four children in this city in the last two weeks

where do we draw the line for them?

where does justice draw the line for these four children?

Now I have two poems by Susan Griffin, from her book, Like the Iris of an Eye, published by Harper & Row in 1975.

Griffin is a poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. She was born in Los Angeles California in 1943

Tiredness

Tiredness licksat my heelsan olddogwalking acrossthe patio;the belly is gone,the hairfaded.I have traveledfrompatio to patio, pool to pooldipping my feetin various seas(Aegean, Atlantic, Pacific)waking eachtime as if now I wouldstay awakeand my feetwould notdoggedly shufflein the same circlelooking at each pointfor the sunlighton the water.Tiredness,I give it to you.I am making a house for you.I will love youlike an old dressbecome worn and soft.I will smile on youwith your hairturning dull and old.I will welcome your aching andyour half-open eyesbecause tiredness at leastyouhave always beenfaithful

Chile

My daughter pleads with mefor the life of our goldfishsouring in a tankof ancient water,"I want themtolive," shesays. Late at nightI pass the green tankstill full of guilt.I have chosen in the hierarchy of my lifeto go to work,to shop,to cook, towrite these wordsbefore saving fish;choices surround me.Nothing is ever right.Every breathing spaceasks for help;dust multiplies in the hallway;lecture notes fly awaythrough windows whichneed glass and paintand in the back of my mindsomewhereis a womanwho weepsfor Chileand shudders at theexecutions.All along shehas beenpondering the social orderand herworried thoughtsslowmy every movement.

One reason hy I like those Chinese samurai movies.

china silk

everything I know about Mandarin Chinese I learned by listening to Chinese movies

there is a soft sound in that language that holds for me a little piece of the mysteries of the orient

it’s a musical sound, something like

sssha

that purses the lips in a way to me most delightful

the Cyrillic alphabet has a similar sound

ssscha

but it’s harsher and harder with something of the Russian winter in it,

while the Mandarin

sssha

seems soft and intimate as china silk

Next I have work by Pablo Neruda, the twelfth and concluding section of his epic poem The Heights of Macchu Picchu. My copy of the book is a twentieth printing by Noonday Press in 1994.

In this section, Neruda speaks, as described by Robert Pring-Mill of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, to "all the men who died building the city so that they might rise again to birth - with him and through him as his brothers."

This is a bilingual edition, Spanish and English, translated by Nathaniel Tarn, on facing pages.

XII

Arise To Birth, with me, my brother.

Give me your hand out of the depthssown by your sorrows.You will not return from these stone fastnesses.You will not emerge from subterranean time.Your rasping voice will not come back,nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,groom of totemic guanacos,mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,iceman of Andean tears,jeweler with crushed fingers,farmer anxious among his seedlings,potter wasted among his clays -bring to the cup of this new lifeyour ancient buried sorrows.Show me your blood and your furrow;say to me: here I was scourgedbecause a gem was dull or because the earthfailed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,the wood they used to crucify your body.Strike the old flintsto kindle ancient lamps,light up the whipsglued to your wounds throughout the centuriesand light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earthlet dead lips congregate,out of the depths spin this long night to meas if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,and link by link and step by step;sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,thrust them into my breast, into my hands,like a torrent of sunbursts,an Amazon of buried jaguars,and leave me cry: hours, days and years,blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

Caution, personal pet peeve ahead.

time’s up

I’m never without my timepiece, but, if, on some dark day, the universe goes into a skid on icy rails and I am without my watch and ask the time of some imperturbable soul, I don’t want to hear “about three” or “a little past six”or “almost noon,” I want to know what time it is, exactly

or when Dee calls and wants me to meet her downtown for dinner and I ask when I don’t want her to say “oh, sevenish, “which is not a time at all but an anti-time, I want to know is that seven, seven-fifteen, six-forty eight or quarter to eight, cause I don’t want to be late and I hate to wait when I’m early

but i am time compulsive and Deeis more attuned to ancient spirits who understood time, if at all, only in terms of dark times and light, moons, seasons, events, heroic feats that mark a particular memorable period as in - oh, yes that was when Uncle Hawk-Flies-Straight killed the grizzly bear which was before Leaping-Fish stole fourteen horses from the Kikapoos, but after Eyes-of-Gray-Wolf married that hussy Little-Green-Meadow in the snow up to their knees

you have to ask yourself how did those guys ever get to dinner on time?

So here's another of my favorite poets. (Amazing how the number of my favorite poets have multiplied since I started this blog six years ago.)

In this instance, the favorite poet is Leroy V. Quintana, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1944 and presently Professor of English at San Diego Mesa College. Quintana served in Vietnam in 1967-68, where he kept a journal that became the source of many of his poems.

The poems I have selected for this week come from his book, The Great Whirl of Exile , published by Curbstone Press in 1999.

Poem for Marilyn Monroe

Proof is what mathematicians' wives contend with,the more proof you require the better the whiskey.

Therefore, if there is a storm, or sayyour minimum wage pays for three weeks and a couple of daysout of the month and electricity turns its back on you,you need only to pull three socks out of fivefrom your dresser drawer to find a match.

The owner agrees; he posed the question,but no matter what brand of truth you offer,the chap next in line for the best fish an chipsin Albuquerque, or New Mexico, in other words, the world,is harder to convince than an enraged tax collector.

It's an easy world; all that needs to be done to be consideredan adult is to lift the plastic sheet over that pictureof hers on the calendar, and her clothes come off Easy.Nobody has to worry about what thirteen-year-oldshave to say or what miracles they pray for.

Poem for Toby Lee

Today, water is not worth all the bloodthat has been spilled over it.

Fish have learned to weep.

The Rio Grande swallows its tears.

Mermaids look to the heaven sand proclaim "Fraud!"

A new law should be enacted: a lifetime mustlast longer than eighteen months.

I drink from her lips,her first love.

The ambulence arrives; the driver wraps herin The Las Cruces Sun-News

Poem for Pancho Gonzales

this was th world of white lines, a gameunlike any other, where the object was to win,only you used words like "please"if your aim ended up improperlyin the next court, "Thank you" whenthe ball was returned and "Love"after you scored first.

Yours was the name that survivedthe hatred only California can inspire,strong enough to be etched in fireon tennis rackets redeemedby thrifty mothers who built a lifeon S&H Green Stamps a dish,a dish, a lamp, and ashtray at a time.

Poem for Grandpa

Grandpa had a furious temper; when angeredcursed fiercely. Even though he knewonly a few words of Englishstarted out by taking the Lord's name in vainwhich was followed by what was clearly Spanish,and then with what would have been fluent Englishhad he been born in Brooklyn and not New Mexico.

The answer to the early question is in. The Spurs lost, an almost perfect season lost to the 8th seed team.

still, there is painin acceptance,and pain in the knowing thatin the end we all grow oldand tireand learn the gunslinger’screed -

for every fast handthere is a faster hand coming,the dark truthlingeringat Black Rock Junction,waiting for the train to our extinction..

arriving soonin the falling hoursof our dim afternoon

~~~

broken championssad heroesfalling……fading

Siegfried Sassoon became a poet in the bloody, muddy trenches of World War I. He was one of the lucky ones, coming out of those trenches alive in the end, part of a generation of truth-telling poets who did not survive the bloood, finding their glory in their poems instead.

Here are three short poems from the collection of his work then, The War Poems, published by faber & faber, first in 1983, with my edition published in 1988.

Glory of Women

You love us when we're heroes, home of leave,Or wounded in a mentionable place.You worship decorations; you believeThat chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.You make us shells. You listen with delight,By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.You crown our distant adours while we fightAnd mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.You can't believer that British troops "retire"When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire,While you are knitting socks to send your sonHis face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Craiglockhart, 1917

Autumn

October's bellowing anger breaks and cleavesThe bronzed battalions of the stricken woodIn whose lament I hear a voice that grievesFor battle's fruitless harvest, and the feudOf outraged men. Their lives are like the leavesScattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blownAlong the westering furnace flaring red.O martyred outh and manhood overthrown,The burden of your wrongs is on my head.

Craiglockhart, 1917

Remorse

Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knowsEach flash and spouting crash, - each instant litWhen gloom reveals the steaming rain. He goesHeavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,"could anything be worse than this?" he wonders,Remembering how he saw the Germans run,Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was oneLivid with terror, clutching at his knees...Our chaps were sticking 'em like pigs..."O hell!"He thought - "there's things in war one dare not tellPoor father sitting safe at home, who readsOf dying heroes and their deathless deeds."

Limerick, 4 February 1918

Sunday morning at breakfast, look around the room who might have a poem behind their over-easy eggs and bacon.

Look, there she is.

the woman with the interesting hair

she’s older than middle-agebut not yet old,with retro-hair, at first glance,war-bride hair,tightly-permed bun up frontand one more on each sideand my first thoughtwas Betty Davis in one of those40’s movies where she’s a haughty bitchwho gets brought down to earthby a strong man’s good kissing and other stuffunmentionedat the time

and though this lookis what I always think of firstwhen I think of Betty Davis, I do the Google-danceand can’t find a single picture of herwith that hair style

so I think to myself, goodness sakes,if it’s not Betty Davis who am I thinking of, then it hits me,Little Orphan Annie,but I Google-dance againand see that it’s not the triple-bun look she hasbut a kind of red/orange afro, a helmet thing,like the motorcycle guys wear, thick, covering foreheadto the nape of her neck, with bumper guards on each sidesticking forward almost to her chin

so, wrong again

then, all of a sudden,(sudden, being this not a poem where things happen slowly)suddenly, way back in the most dusty corners of my brain,where the oatmealhas turned to redi-mix concrete plugs ofalmost forgotten memory,(like the pretty yellow-haired girl who played with meon the sidewalk in front of a houseI don’t even remember)way-back stuff, in other words,concrete shifts, cracks,and breaks through it all my to my firstfictionalgirlfriend, Lil’ LuLu,except instead of one brillo-pad buncentered up frontshe has two, along with the two sticking outbehind her ears,not exactly right, but hellI’ve already spend 30 minutes thinkingabout this, and the woman with the interestingfinished her breakfast and leftlong ago, so I don’t even have anymore the real modelto compare my memories to, so anything morefalls into the dead horse beating category,which I would never do, beat a dead horse or any other animalalive or dead,and to avoid beating such dead horse, or any other animal,dead or alive,I am satisfied to label this the “Lil’ Lulu” simile,or metaphor, I never can keep those too straight,which one is which one, which one is “like”and which one is “is”and you couldprobablyhelp here by taking over while I finish mycoffeeand flapjacks,except I didn’t really have flapjacks

I just like the word,has a kind of Rocky MountainBunyon and Babeflannel shirtfeel toitthat jump starts my testosterone flowand pumps up my masculineimaginationof tall trees and soft grasses

Next, I have a poem by Wendy Barker, from her book, The Way of Whiteness, published by Wings Press of San Antonio in 2000.

Barker, born in 1942, is Poet-in-Residence and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982.She received her B.A. and M.A. from Arizona State University and her Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Davis. Barker also taught high school English in Scottsdale, Arizona, between 1966–68 and in Berkeley, between 1968-72.

She has published five books of poetry and three chapbooks as well as a selection of poems with accompanying drafts and essays about the writing process. Her translations (with Saranindranath Tagore) of Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Sourette Diehl Fraser Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Another one of my favorite poets, simple words, a deep, but simple, story.

On the Subject of Jackets

Toward the last, my father asked for his tweedjacket, described the tie, the striped shirthe wanted to wear to the hospital, not knowing

he would be strapped to a gurney, dressedonly in a short cotton gown for the windingambulance ride on New Hampshire roads

across the river. I followed in the car withmy mother, snug behind the wheel, sun throughthe windshield. A thermos of tea beside us.

He asked for his jacket in the voice he had usedto a secretary on the other side of his polished desk.People signed their names to his words.

Today you tell me your grandfather, seventy yearsranching in the Texas hills, is dying. Matter of fact,you say when it happens you won't know who you are.

Clean blue of a New England September skyas my mother and I pushed through the glassentrance from the shop-lined street where

I decided to buy a jacket. Soft, same blueas the skirt I wore that he had touched,saying, "Pretty, this is pretty."

Every morning I pressed that skirt,stroked the iron over the bluecloth of the jacket, color of his eyes.

Wore it when I walked into his roomunable to talk because he couldn't.For weeks the jacket covered me

as I met my classes. And then one afternoon,I left it in the room where I met youthat fall my father died. You blue eyes, like his.

You talk now of the way your grandfatherwielded a knife for castrating calves.The jacket's cloth was smooth from all that ironing.

I never got it back. I have nothing left to prepare youfor the cold, except what I cannot give. Strokingof skin on skin. the clothes we can never wear.

Once, with nothing to do (not a rarity in my life) I decided to make a list of famous people with whom I had had an encounter.

Not many, but here they are.

rubbing elbows

I bumped into, literally, Chet Huntley in the Indiana University library and David Brinkley about twenty-five years later at a chamber of commerce dinner; I saw Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle as they passed in a motorcade, Ike in Texas and de Gaulle in Paris; I sneaked into a lecture by LBJ at Texas State University and had several close interactions with George Bush while he was governor; I was on the University of Texas campus when the crazy guy started shooting people from the UT Tower, but I was on the north side while he was mostly shooting south, all the way downtown, and didn’t know anything was going on until it was almost over; I saw Freddy Fender once when he was visiting a friend of his who was a coworker of mine; I’ve seen David Robinson at the bowling alley and at a bookstore, and I saw Popovich once at the same bookstore looking at wine magazines

that’s pretty much all the famous people I’ve had any kind of contact with

I’ve seen a bunch of unfamous people, too, but I don’t remember their names

My last poem from my library this week is by Robert Pinsky and it's from his book Gulf Music. The book was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.

Inman Square Incantation

Forgive us, we don't exactly believe or disbelieveWhat the President tells us regarding the great issuesOf peace, justice and war - skeptical, but distracted

By the swarm of things. The young Romanian poet in L.A:She said, "In Romania, bums are just bums, but hereIn America the bum pushes a cart loaded with his things."

With a mean elfin look one of the homeless cartersin Alfred Vellucci Park sometimes bets usingA stuffed dog, bear or bunny as a prop: the paper cup

Panhandled toward us passing marks puppetwise -Can you spare a little for Teddy? Or The Doggie's hungry -Crooning maternal parody, a wheedling mock-innocence.

The noseringed leather kids who haunt the T station seemThe reverse - feigned menace.But one bashed some black girlsOn the train, using the kind of metal rod called an "asp."

Some money to feed the bunny? his little poetry reading.And the plush animal a street sign among signs, his adFor something more personal and abounding than just need.

His smirk knows a thing sharper than pity to block my way byThe brazen ten-fot tenor saxophone that markes Ryles,To Top Cleaners, the bank machine and Patel Quick Food Mart.

Thedictionary says that a thing is first of all an assembly.Forgive the word "bums." Forgive "homeless," our sheepishEuphemism. "Derelict" is better for these forsaken.

Rescue and cleansing, diversion and provender, let'sRemember, you rat-faced beggar: I dislike you. Forgive me.And if as I pass again from where I've been I choose to take

A dead president from my breast pocket where I stowed the thingTo put it in your cup, it isn't Charity, but superstition - a provisionalWishful conspiring with the artist in you, son of a bitch, bastard.

I wrote this last week after reading the quote that leads the poem and on the same day that, as mentioned earlier, the weather seemed to be surrendering to the forces of chaos. It's my last poem for the week.

chaos management

“I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life. What I don’t like is mismanagement of chaos” &nbssp; - Franketienne, Haitian author, poet, playwright, painter

there are patterns to the universe,from the orbits of galaxiesto the circlingof the tiniest electronaround it’s mother-neutron anchorto the greening and fallingof leavesto the daily commuteof bankers and paintersand donut makersto the soft sleep of babes and the longdry nightsof old and time-worn menall circling

all circlingeach circle a world within itselfinter-acting with its fellows in shadowsof confusion, like looking at the color patternsof gumballsencased in glass,patterns seen only through a one-eyedsquint from some great distance, the further awaythe clearer becomes the organizationred upon green next to blue under yellow,each placed in a structured chaos,like the universein all it chaotic glory, structured truthwe can never get distance enoughto see, an incubator spewing chaos,indestructible unalterable manageableonly through the indirectionof unseen handsthat must never fumbleor chaos will solidify and all the circleswill stop their spinningand fall to the lethargy of inertia stilledand all that is will, like Lot’s wife,turn to salt crumbling on a silent plainin a steady wind of never-again

I know I said the above poem was my last for the week, but here's one more, in celebration of a very good week.

if I could walk on water

he’s deadshot in the headdeadby Fredthe stalking Seal

(really big dealsthose Sealswho made himdeadwith a shot to thehead)

andif I could walkon water I’d danceon his grave

dat's it.

Not sure why I do this every week, but I'm told it may protect me from being sued and having all my vast profits from "Here and Now" seized by indignant poets. (How much is 100% nothing?)

Anyway, I am appreciative to all the poets whose work I borrow and it certainly should clear that they are just borrowed and never claimed as my own. All others should respect that as well, recognizing that all the material in the blog remains the property of its creators. My stuff, as I've said before, is available to anyone who wants it merely for the courtesy of proper credit for me and "Here and Now."

And the me in this case is, me, allen itz, owner and producer of this blog and frequent visitor to my fellow poets' well of goodwill and encouragement.